Source : National Post

Cherry's anti-visor rant was racist, pure and simple

The comment was pure Don Cherry and it was pure poison. "Visors," he said on our national network a week ago Saturday, "are for Europeans and Frenchmen."

I first heard of it a few days later when a Radio-Canada crew working the pressbox at the Bell Centre asked what I thought. Speaking in rather awkward fashion in our nation's other official language and without time to reflect, I said the comment was "almost racist."

I would now like to withdraw that statement: What Cherry said was not almost racist. It was racist, pure and simple. A slap in the face to one of Canada's two founding peoples, an insult to half the players in the league and, for good measure, a punishingly stupid argument in favour of more eye injuries in the National Hockey League.

If all bigotry stems from ignorance, then Cherry is as ignorant as they come, because what he was saying, in effect, was that players who wear visors are cowards and that only the cowardly Frenchmen and Europeans would wear one.

For a man who loves to glorify the military, Cherry betrayed an almost stunning ignorance of every battle from Austerlitz to Verdun to Dieppe -- and here we are speaking only of the courage of French soldiers from both France and Quebec. Beyond that, he clearly has never heard of the Scandinavian berserkers who were once the scourge of Europe, the Battle of Poltava or the courage of the Finns in their fight against the Soviets at the beginning of the Second World War.

By now, of course, we have come to expect such ignorance from Cherry. But this time, he might finally come home to roost.

Some of the most intelligent and serious criticism of Cherry's comment has come from former Canadiens coach Jacques Demers. Demers normally sidesteps controversy, but this time he has waded right into a potentially explosive national debate.

Across the spectrum of his many media jobs in both official languages, Demers has called for Cherry to make a full public apology. Failing that, says Demers, the CBC should act at last and fire Cherry for bigotry.

As Demers points out, prominent public figures in the U.S. such as Al Campanis and Rush Limbaugh have been fired for less -- but for reasons that are hard for the French-speaking minority in this country to understand, Cherry goes on and on.

Cherry is a strange animal. His first and most obvious motive is to make money and at that he has been highly successful.

He doesn't care what you or I or the Prime Minister has to say about him, because he's laughing all the way to the bank.

I was reluctant to enter this fray, mostly because I have come to believe that for Cherry there is no such thing as bad publicity and that all we can do by criticizing him is to make him wealthier. As I said on Radio-Canada, I have long suspected that Cherry himself does not believe half of what he says; that a man who is old enough to know better, who has travelled a bit and been exposed to other cultures could not possibly be the bigoted, narrow-minded nincompoop that Cherry plays on Coach's Corner every Saturday night.

Unfortunately, if there is a brighter and more sensitive man buried in there somewhere, Cherry keeps him well-hidden. Of late, it seems, he has gotten worse and worse. Either he feels immune to reprisal from the CBC, or his fatuous opinions have such a grip on the man that he is determined to trot them out even if they cost him his job. Sadly, the comment about Frenchmen and Europeans was not at all out of character.

Obviously, the network recognizes that it has a problem on its hands.

When the B.C. and Yukon branch of the Canadian parents for French makes a formal complaint in writing to the president of the CBC, it is obvious that Cherry is well on his way to becoming a contentious national issue.

The statement from the parents group also cited the pathetic Ron MacLean joke that has been going the rounds, when MacLean chose the opening of the Bobby Orr Hall of Fame in Parry Sound, of all places, to say that Cherry has nothing against French immersion: "He just figures they don't hold them down long enough."

The network's response was wholly inadequate. CBC spokeswoman Ruth-Ellen Soles said: "Don and Ron are there to comment about hockey and stick to hockey. The opinions are Don's and Ron's and not CBC's, and we don't agree with them."

Soles does not go nearly far enough. It is no longer sufficient for the CBC to say that it disagrees with the buffoon whose opinions it broadcasts coast-to-coast every Saturday night. It is time for Canada's national network to make it clear that some of those opinions are not merely repugnant but racist and intolerable, that nothing less than a full public apology will suffice and that failing that, Cherry's contract will be terminated immediately.

If the CBC will not act, then the public will have to act in its place. The people of Quebec, francophone and anglophone alike, should lead the way in demanding Cherry's removal.

And if pressure on the network is not enough, it's time to strike where the network will feel it most -- with a national boycott of the advertisers who sponsor Coach's Corner and Hockey Night in Canada.

Enough is enough. And when it comes to Canada's national embarrassment, we have seen enough.

© National Post